| Mattole Restoration Council |
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Location: Mattole River watershed, Humboldt and Mendocino counties, northern coast, California. Objective: To restore the natural systems in the Mattole River watershed and their maintenance at sustainable levels of health and productivity, especially the forests, fisheries, soils, and other native plant and animal communities. Participants: Approximately 300 watershed residents and landowners are paid members of the Mattole Restoration Council, which aims to be a watershed-based democracy. It works with several associate groups: Lower Mattole Fire Safe Council, Mill Creek Watershed Conservancy, Middle Mattole Conservancy, Mattole Salmon Group and Sanctuary Forest. History: Before it empties into the Pacific Ocean, the Mattole River flows north along the King Range through a geological hotbed just inland from the Mattole Triple Junction, where three tectonic plates meet. In this landscape of active earthquakes, change is the constant. Before Europeans arrived, the Mattole and Sinkyone Indians occupied the remote watershed, lush with redwood and Douglas fir forests, and streams teeming with salmon. The influx of settlers in the 1850s brought cattle and a bustling agricultural community despite the isolated location 250 miles north of San Francisco. When loggers moved into the area after World War II, timber harvesting soon became the economic mainstay, with eight sawmills operating out of Honeydew alone between 1950 and 1970. The logging boom was in part the result of an ad valorem state tax on standing timber, an incentive to cut as much as possible as fast as possible. The activities left the landscape a wasteland of eroding hillsides and poorly planned roads. The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of urban refugees who sought a lifestyle outside of the established economic systems - one that connected them with natural processes. In the late 1970s, Mattole residents noticed a precipitous drop in the number of salmon returning from the Pacific to spawn. The residents formed the Salmon Group and, in 1978, launched a restoration effort aimed specifically at increasing salmon numbers by trapping adults, and capturing and incubating fertilized eggs. The volunteer rescuers knew sediment was contributing to salmon declines, but after a winter during which some 375 acres slid into the main stem of the Mattole, they realized the problem was bigger than the streams themselves. In 1983, a group of around 40 people gathered under the Council Madrone, the largest tree of its species in the world. By the end of the afternoon, the group had formed the Mattole Restoration Council (MRC), dedicated to restoration of the entire watershed. As fluid and dynamic as the watershed it serves, the MRC began as an umbrella organization that took in the Salmon Group, community service groups, local land trusts, a tree-planter cooperative and others. To create a watershed-based democracy, it formed as a membership organization eligible to all residents and landowners of the Mattole watershed. It would vote on decisions, the founders agreed, "because, after all, we are not all Quakers." While the work of trapping and incubating wild salmon continued, other MRC members launched a systematic study of the entire watershed. The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) owns around 22 percent of the area. The rest is private, a mix of working ranches, rural residences, and recently created private conservation areas. Maps with cultural, historical, ecological and geomorphologic details are compiled in Elements of Recovery, a landmark 1989 handbook for restoration that planned projects to reduce sediment throughout the watershed. In the late 1980s, the chaos that reigned throughout the rural Pacific Northwest over the endangered northern spotted owl brought fresh turmoil to the Mattole, shattering the fragile alliances formed between the long-established ranchers and the back-to-the-land settlers over their common interest in salmon. But the federal listing also brought funding, which the MRC used for a variety of sediment-reduction projects. The MRC remained a loose-knit coalition without full-time staff until 1996, when it began a reorganization process that culminated in 2000 with the hiring of Chris Larson as executive director of a paid staff, which would keep regular office hours. By then, the MRC had its own board of directors, which pursued council projects. Today the Council works closely with the Mattole Salmon Group, which focuses directly on salmon and streams while the MRC does public outreach and upslope restoration. Although the council's strongest base of membership is among rural residents, absentee land owners and retiree community members, it enjoys support from over half the 930 landowners. Accomplishments: Elements of Recovery estimated that poor road conditions produced nearly 75 percent of the watershed's erosion. Guided by a watershed-wide plan focused on sediment reduction, the MRC began working with the BLM to decommission abandoned roads on public land. The partners started with the worst ones on a list drawn up by the BLM during the decades when it had no money to do the work. By 1996, they had used over $1 million in Northwest Forest Plan economic adjustment funds to eliminate 15 miles of road and repair others. Next, the partners focused on erosion sources in the high-quality fisheries habitats of the Mattole River headwaters. In 1999 the MRC launched Good Roads Clear Creeks, an inventory of sediment sources on private property, using tools ranging from aerial photos to observations by people walking roads. Around 30 percent of the watershed has been assessed. Treatment completed on around 10 percent of the watershed has focused on repairing culverts, restoring road banks and removing some roads. The Old-Growth Map, another 1989 study, showed that 90 percent of the Mattole watershed's old-growth forests had been cut between 1947 and 1988. Despite controversial and widely publicized protests against additional logging of what's left, the Council has placed a recent emphasis on the rehabilitation of the 90 percent already logged. Before this, little management and almost no tree planting had taken place. Heavy fuel loads created fire risk and poor habitat for wildlife. Through its Wild and Working Forests program, MRC began cooperating with 60 landowners to plan thinning and fire safety projects to improve the watershed's forestlands. Using a comprehensive fire-risk assessment, the MRC hopes to produce information that will foster sensible decisions, including the costs of pre-commercial thinning vs. immediate potential income from logging. Landowners are developing and implementing forest management plans that are both ecologically and economically sustainable.
During its 22-year history the MRC has successfully collaborated with local landowners and conservation groups as well as state and federal agencies. Approximately 85 percent of its $1.4 million annual budget is state and federal grant funding or fee-for-service contracts payment. Along with its many on-the-ground projects, the MRC has raised awareness of the plight of salmon within the Mattole watershed. Once the salmon trapping and rearing project put the watershed on the map, the council held the agencies' feet to the fire, insisting that they respond. It has made its findings so compelling that local ranchers, timber operators, and absentee landowners alike have acknowledged them. Recent years have seen timber harvests and ranching practices that are friendlier to the landscape. In the process, the MRC has raised a generation of children who are both environmentally aware and equipped with the tools to improve land use wherever they live. Its in-school education program includes a month-long watershed study, classroom salmon rearing from egg to release in the river, and environmental career development for high school students. The Council has also amassed a library of books and aerial photographs available to the public at two locations. Challenges: Following the precedent set by the 1989 Elements of Recovery, the MRC is in the process of coordinating a 2005 comprehensive plan setting forth a 30-year vision for the entire watershed. An associated five-year implementation plan will recommend site-specific projects that include salmon rearing, restoration forestry, reducing forest fuel loads, and removing invasive species. Ranchers and other landowners are increasingly willing to cooperate with these efforts, with around 75 percent allowing projects on their property. Several will be hired to do the work, increasing the trust and customizing each project to individual landowners' needs. The clock is ticking as the MRC works to protect the landscape through both preservation easements and ecologically sound management that brings some economic return to landowners. Many landowners are tempted by the high prices developers are offering and the quick money clearcutting promises. "We have 10 years to get our act together," Larson says. Larson is part of a younger breed of people moving into the watershed and assuming responsibility as the founders of the MRC retire or move on to other pursuits. Few of this generation have the knowledge their predecessors developed over decades of on-the-ground work; none of them has had direct experience with wild salmon. And they are confronting difficulties the back-to-the-land generation did not face, primarily finding affordable places to live. The MRC will be challenged to retain the professional and energetic recruits it has attracted. But this new generation has some advantages in dealing with established landowners. Without the "dope-smoking-hippie" baggage of their predecessors, they are forging new relationships with ranchers and enjoy better landowner involvement in their projects. Still, lifestyle differences continue and trust is often elusive. Some ranchers feel the MRC could earn it by working harder to seek their knowledge of local land and weather patterns, and by sending onto private property only employees who are well informed and honest about the ecosystems where they are working. Whether the work of the MRC has resulted in greater numbers of salmon is an enormous unknown, fraught with many uncertainties that include oceanic conditions and worldwide weather patterns. What is known is that wherever the council reduces sediment loads in streams, riparian habitat health improves. The MRC has been a consistent and long-lived watchdog for salmon, encouraging landowners and agencies alike to improve their land management to benefit the endangered species. Its impact has reverberated throughout the Mattole watershed and far beyond the remote valley. For more information see: Mattole Restoration Council Homepage Elements of Recovery Report |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 May 2008 ) | |||||
